Information and insight from the A&M Webmasters

After almost a year of knowing we need to implement a new calendar, evaluating vendors, and customizing our final selection, we are happy to announce that our new web calendar is now online.

Powered by LiveWhale Calendar, this new system represents a significant step forward. The new software is much easier to use and administer than our previous system, and offers many new features that make the calendar more valuable to both departments on campus and our website viewers.

Even more important than the new features is a new philosophy for what the calendar is all about. Rather than being just a list of everybody’s events, we want to use the calendar as a platform to market the university by showing off all the wonderful things that take place on campus. We want no not just give a time and date for every meeting on campus, but also to showcase things like the world leaders that the Bush School brings to campus, the prestigious authors that the libraries host, Fortune 500 CEOs that speak at the Mays school, and so forth. Showing the types of events that occur here reinforces with our audience the concept of Texas A&M as a destination school.

To that end, we want to produce a calendar that not only gave event details, but does so in a highly visual manner that makes viewers interested in reading the event – and therefore more likely to attend. The LiveWhale calendar system is beautifully set up to do this. During several vendor conversations it became evident that they were in sync with what we want to do and that they have built a platform with exactly that in mind.

We will post a series of articles going over the new features of the calendar, how we hope to use it, and how you can contribute to the process.